Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Lyth

3 years and one expansion later is a long time for a "mistake" to go unnoticed, though.

Considering these are the same developers that rarely deal with unintended developments unless they involve very recent content and enough complaints surface (Ramuh EX with Titan-egi comes to mind), it wouldn't surprise me. Also consider their aversion for outright nerfing things.

I'm a bit baffled with this part. If damage output is irrelevant to a tank, then why are you using RA or GB? RoH maximises enmity and mitigation. You're actually losing enmity and mitigation by using these other combos.

Since you didn't read or ignored parts of my prior posts, I'll reiterate: I'm okay with tanks having abilities that let them deal some damage. Rage of Halone's debuff lasts 20 seconds, and combined with Shield Oath's enmity bonuses you can afford to rotate Halone, Goring Blade and Royal Authority. As I said in an earlier post, you can rotate all three to the point Halone's debuff only drops for 1 or 2 seconds between applications (assuming you want to prioritize Royal Authority over RoH). You're still generating aggro while in Shield Oath; more than if you were trying to tank a mob in Sword Oath and while taking less damage, to boot.

And all I said was that damage to a tank is a means to an end, not that it's irrelevant.

Originally Posted by DaulBan

Tank stance will always be dropped by tanks in order to do more damage if they so wish. Unless you wholesale nerf the base to terribad DPS you will still have people dropping stance to do more damage. I'd say that the choice to drop your tank stance is about as ingrained into tanking now as the shield stance itself.

There's other ways to bring change without nerfing damage from abilities. One would be a mechanical punishment (maybe the equivalent of WoW crushing blows or insta-crits). Another would be increasing tank damage to the point it's more beneficial overall to full-time your defensive stance when tanking the boss. Lastly, and healers won't like this, but set the pace of battle and damage taken by the raid to the point anyone taking extra damage creates the risk of the healer going OOM (and that would include tanks making themselves take more damage than they should).

DPSing as tanks is some of the most braindead activities in the game. You should at least try in difficult content to be better than the bare minimum. Again, doesn't matter in casual content but in savage content it does.

Ignoring the issue of stances, the means to maximize DPS are there. At 60 PLD can and should work Goring Blade and Royal Authority into the rotation in addition to the other tank duties, and not exclusively use Rage of Halone. DRK, as I've said before, has a similar ability flow and priorities, so that also works for them.

I can't imagine the frustration of being in a static where the tanks did ~500 DPS and said that because they were holding aggro everything was fine on the 5% enrages.

And instead of reaching the logical conclusion of "let's gear our DPS", you're trying to blame the tank for not meeting a DPS check. That's bizarro world logic in almost every possible way.

Finally, if trickles down because it's the best way to do it.

"Best", "balanced" and "intended" are not always the same. Reckoning Bomb could have been the "best" way to kill a boss, but it was a broken as hell way of doing that. Utsusemi was considered by some the "best" way to mitigate things, but it was still a broken ability that screwed with the rest of FFXI's design. The grenade trick on the platforms during progression on Heroic Lich king was for a short time the "best" way of doing things, but it was still broken as hell (to the point Blizzard stripped the guild that got world first of their clear because of it). Sitting around in turn 2 for 9 minutes so that you could power heal through the enrage instead of actually doing the mechanics was the "best" way of doing it, but it was still broken as hell.

Simply saying "it's the best" is not, well, the best reasoning.

Originally Posted by Frowny

I think that may speak more to how tanking can just be boring. I can't speak for everyone, but I'd rather DPS an instance than tank one.

Tanking does require a specific mindset, just like healing does (and I'll be the first one to say I do NOT have the mindset for healing, which is why I generally avoid it). A person is allowed to lean towards what they find fun, and if tanking is not your bag, that's okay.